Say you have a personal goal: you want to build a business, lose weight or learn a language. Does it make more sense to set a deadline for that goal (i.e. I want to speak conversational French in 9 months) or should you ignore it? I think this is an interesting question because, on the […]
What’s More Productive: Counting Hours or Tasks Accomplished?
I’m a big fan of setting constraints to get work done. If you make work a scarcer quantity, you’re more likely to use time wisely and get things done than if it feels like an endless to-do list. There’s two key ways you can do this: restrict your hours or restrict your workload. Restricting hours […]
Why Most People Get Stuck in Their Careers
During this week, Cal Newport and I want to share some of few of the most useful and surprising lessons we’ve learned from teaching our career mastery course, Top Performer, to over two thousand students. We will only be posting this first lesson publicly. If you want to get the other lessons (for free), please […]
What I’ve Been Reading
Here’s some of the books I’ve read lately: Flash Boys – Michael Lewis’s book about high-frequency trading and Wall Street corruption. I’m quite envious of Lewis’s ability to take a complicated story that hinges on weird financial derivatives and somehow make it a page-turner. The Undoing Project – Also by Lewis, this one covers Israeli […]
I'm a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, podcast host, computer programmer and an avid reader. Since 2006, I've published weekly essays on this website to help people like you learn and think better. My work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider and more. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.